


Red Days (The Nicht Neues Im Westen Remix)

by mabyn



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, M/M, Old mutants in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 13:23:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4223343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mabyn/pseuds/mabyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of the world, all Charles and Erik really have is each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Days (The Nicht Neues Im Westen Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [obstinatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/obstinatrix/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Nicht Neues Im Westen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2698226) by [obstinatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/obstinatrix/pseuds/obstinatrix). 
  * In response to a prompt by [obstinatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/obstinatrix/pseuds/obstinatrix) in the [remixmadness2015](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/remixmadness2015) collection. 



> A/N: obstinatrix’s lovely Nicht Neues Im Westen is a beautiful, meditative canon fic that evokes so much emotion with so few words. Go read it!
> 
> Thanks to albymangroves for the beta.

It’s been a long way back to the start.

Erik shivers beside him in the dark, frigid room. The cold of the Canadian wilderness penetrates their skin all the more for their old age, and this ramshackle hut gives little protection. Every now and then Charles tenses when he hears scratching at the outside window followed by low inhuman moans, but he dares not betray his fear when everyone is relying on him for strength. 

How ironic that this —that they— should be humanity’s last hope. 

Charles wheels closer to the piled sacks of grain that pass for a bed. He places a hand on Erik’s thin shoulder. Erik looks back at him with eyes brimming full of everything unsaid between them. There were long, hard years during which Charles numbed himself to the demands of his own body, never mind the secret stirrings of his heart. 

At times it seemed like he was achieving something. For every disappointment, and there were a lot of those, came a ray of hope. A mutant walking down the New York City streets in broad daylight without shame, a sympathetic story in the media, a new mutant rights law. 

Then began the red days when he’d gaze out from the upstairs window of the mansion at the long stretch of pristine land surrounding him, seemingly — deceptively — barren of life, and ask himself how it had all gone so wrong. But then, he already knew the answer.

The first time Charles broke into the emptiness of a zombie’s mind and found nothing he could control was the first time he’d ever felt truly powerless.

“They’ll find them. They’ll find Patient Zero.”

Erik nods. He’s the only one who has ever welcomed Charles into his mind, even if only for brief moments like these. The power to intimately understand every person he met, and all it had ever done was isolate him. It was with Erik and Erik alone that Charles could find the union he’d always craved, and no matter how tempestuous the waters, Charles was willing, even overeager, to swim. In spite of his outward calm, Erik now struggles to stay afloat while a dark undertow threatens to drag him down. His thoughts come rapid and unsteady, _how, why, what if_.

What if. Charles has long abandoned fruitless anger. What if Charles had been able to prove definitively that zombiism was a naturally occurring, transmittable mutation? What if it was, as Erik believed, a virus planted by humans in Genosha to wipe them all out? What if Erik hadn’t in his mad vengeance smuggled infected mutants back out to the rest of the world? 

In the end, the only thing that matters is finding the origin case and eliminating it. And for that, they’ll have to trust Kitty in the next room. Logan. The younger, more brash, more foolish versions of themselves.

But that’s not, Charles realizes, what Erik is most regretting right now. Not really. 

“Oh, Erik. No,” Charles says.

There were the stolen kisses in dark alleyways, the crash of lamps in cheap motels, the tumult of limbs after another battle, but never the waking up in each other’s arms, never the languid afternoons, never the cooking and enjoying of meals side by side. It had always been passionate intensity followed by the unending ache of separation, without the hundred mundane things that created a life together. But what they have, is theirs. 

Charles leans in. The hesitant, tender kiss is both one he’s always tasted and like none other. It’s more slow exploration than a rush to other things. Charles is struck now by the softness of Erik’s lips, a quality long obscured by the brashness with which Erik devoured him in the past, mouth hard on Charles’s throat while he would strip Charles of his clothes with eager efficiency. They’d never had time for gentleness. 

Now Erik is wondering if this is the end, but for Charles it feels like the first moment of something else. He thumbs Erik’s unshaven cheek, and Erik yields when Charles tugs him closer. Beneath Erik’s fine silk uniform, hard angle and bone are all that’s left of his once muscled body, but even still there’s strength enough to steady him. Charles deepens the kiss until Erik’s blood spikes, and Charles half smiles at them, two old men still exciting each other after all these years. 

There’s a quick knock, and the sound of the door opening. Storm. Erik jerks back, then fixes the hair Charles has mussed, but the flush on his cheeks only deepens. 

“How’s it going out there?” Charles asks, keeping their hands linked. He notes the moment Erik’s embarrassment gives way to the realization that Storm has long known about them. 

“We’re holding on,” she says.

Erik threads his fingers back through Charles’s, and Charles returns the confidence with a gentle squeeze. He feels something in Erik settle. “So are we.”


End file.
